MacMillan's Reading Books eBook

It will, I presume, be allowed that no human character,
which we have the opportunity of studying with equal
minuteness, had fewer faults mixed up in its texture.
The grand virtue of fortitude, the basis of all others,
was never displayed in higher perfection than in him;
and it was, as perhaps true courage always is, combined
with an equally admirable spirit of kindness and humanity.
His pride, if we must call it so, undebased by the
least tincture of mere vanity, was intertwined with
a most exquisite charity, and was not inconsistent
with true humility. If ever the principle of
kindliness was incarnated in a mere man, it was in
him; and real kindliness can never be but modest.
In the social relations of life, where men are most
effectually tried, no spot can be detected in him.
He was a patient, dutiful, reverent son; a generous,
compassionate, tender husband; an honest, careful,
and most affectionate father. Never was a more
virtuous or a happier fireside than his. The
influence of his mighty genius shadowed it imperceptibly;
his calm good sense, and his angelic sweetness of
heart and temper, regulated and softened a strict
but paternal discipline. His children, as they
grew up, understood by degrees the high privilege
of their birth; but the profoundest sense of his greatness
never disturbed their confidence in his goodness.
The buoyant play of his spirits made him sit young
among the young; parent and son seemed to live in
brotherhood together; and the chivalry of his imagination
threw a certain air of courteous gallantry into his
relations with his daughters, which gave a very peculiar
grace to the fondness of their intercourse.

Perhaps the most touching evidence of the lasting
tenderness of his early domestic feelings was exhibited
to his executors, when they opened his repositories
in search of his testament, the evening after his
burial. On lifting up his desk we found arranged
in careful order a series of little objects, which
had obviously been so placed there that his eye might
rest on them every morning before he began his tasks.
These were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished
his mother’s toilet when he, a sickly child,
slept in her dressing-room; the silver taper-stand
which the young advocate had bought for her with his
first five-guinea fee; a row of small packets inscribed
with her hand, and containing the hair of those of
her offspring that had died before her; his father’s
snuff-box and pencil-case; and more things of the like
sort, recalling the “old familiar faces.”
The same feeling was apparent in all the arrangement
of his private apartment. Pictures of his father
and mother were the only ones in his dressing-room.
The clumsy antique cabinets that stood there—­things
of a very different class from the beautiful and costly
productions in the public rooms below—­had
all belonged to the furniture of George’s Square.
Even his father’s rickety washing-stand, with
all its cramped appurtenances, though exceedingly